Holman Christian Standard Bible

 I was already aware that the NET Bible was developed because Bible.org was wanting to publish free Bible studies on the Internet, and had problems getting copyright permissions. They put it like this in their preface:

Bible.org’s ministry objective is to be used by God to mature Christians worldwide. To accomplish this we needed to quote a modern Bible translation in the production of thousands of trustworthy Bible Study resources that could be offered on the Internet for free. We predicted in 1995 that the number of Bible verses quoted in these studies would soon surpass available legal permission limits. We tried for a year, but could not obtain the necessary permissions. Lack of a legal ability to quote the Bible online makes online Bible studies impossible and threatened bible.org’s “Ministry First” model. Quite simply the only way we could secure permission to quote a modern Bible was to sponsor a new translation – the NET Bible. We now want to ensure that other ministries and authors don’t experience the same roadblocks. The NET Bible is not just for bible.org, but for everyone.

(There's also more written here.)

But I was surprised to learn today that the Holman Christian Standard Bible was also published partly for reasons relating to copyright as explained here:

In 1998 the people at Broadman & Holman were seeking to buy the copyright of some already-existing Bible version for use in their publishing projects. For many years they had been using the New International Version, but this was not convenient for them, because the copyright holder of the NIV (the International Bible Society) had sold exclusive North American publishing rights for their translation to the Zondervan corporation in Grand Rapids, and Zondervan would allow other publishers to use the NIV only under some very expensive and restrictive license agreements.

 So one just can't help wondering how many Christian ministries around the world continue to be frustrated in their outreaches and discipleship programs because of copyrights on Bibles. Personally, I think the world is ripe for a new approach.